She had given her levitating machine gun the order to focus all fire at the worm's face before the katana had even connected. With the worm's lower jaw pinned to the ground by the unbreakable sword, it had finally stopped shifting long enough for her to unleash her full power against it.

The ray of corkscrewing white light drilled into the fractured epileptic face of the worm-wraith. Its inhuman screech filled the entire atrium, echoing through the arches and domes until it achieved a communal shrillness, as though more than one creature were dying. Seconds passed as more and more of the all-consuming light obliterated the thing's face, forming a swirling hole of oblivion where it struck. The screech built in intensity until all at once it dispersed into only a few scattered remnants reverberating within the cavernous architecture. Soon even those died away beneath the din of the machine gun.

The worm's head bulged out like a balloon and exploded. In a chain reaction, the rest of the elongated body followed. Each individual segment expanded until it could no longer contain the light and erupted into a cascade of flesh, oil, and cubes. Each eruption grew smaller as the segments tapered to the tail, and the very last segment fizzled more than exploded.

(Chapter 6)